Despite the web’s social nature, Business Intelligence software remains largely “un-social.” While we see collaborative features increasing within BI software, this study from Dresner Advisory Services finds that BI collaboration still largely occurs the old-fashioned way–via meetings and email.

As companies seek to gain more value from their data, we’ll see this change. We’ll see more social features invade traditional BI software, with collaboration occurring within the BI application rather than email and meetings.

3. BI breaks out of the silos

One of the biggest problems with traditional BI solutions: Silos. Different departments store data in different systems, which leaves business leaders trying to make sense of different data from different sources. Going forward, we’ll see a convergence in BI, giving executives the data they need from a single source.

“Companies now understand that Big Data analysis executed in silos doesn’t provide a complete picture,” says Nandavarapu. “In order to achieve the maximum benefits, companies have to synthesize analytic results across domains (customer, supply chain, marketing, etc.) and work to produce holistic insights. Since traditional technology often struggles to cope up with the volume and variety of new and complex sources of data, new data mining and extracting tools have been introduced specifically designed to handle disparate sources of data. With the right architecture and tools, these systems can interact intelligently, share data and/or analytic results between components and minimize data movement. As a result, overall analysis efficiency has been given a boost and producing better returns.”

4. BI becomes proactive

BI solutions of the past provided a reactive approach–offering historical analysis of business data on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. While useful for understanding the business, reactive BI doesn’t capitalize on the rise of real-time data.

As more companies adopt real-time analytic solutions, we’ll see a rise in proactive BI. This approach alerts users to important data changes as they happen, and lets business leaders make quick, yet informed decisions.

For example, we’ll see more BI solutions that automatically alert business leaders to real-time, dramatic shifts in data. This proactive approach will help businesses become more agile, and address problems as they occur–not days later.

5. Self-Service BI improves efficiency

Traditional BI methods involved end users going through the IT department for reports and analytics, or creating their own reports on spreadsheets. As BI tools become simpler, we’re seeing that change. BI is moving outside of the IT department and into the hands of business users–creating a rise in BI efficiency.

“Self-service BI equips users with direct access to business data and empowers them to collect and analyze data independent of the IT department,” explains Tiemo Winterkamp, Senior VP of Global Marketing at arcplan. “With modern tools users can create dashboards and ad-hoc reports on their own, something that was previously only possible with the aid of IT specialists. Using self-service capabilities, organizations allocate resources wisely by providing information workers with a guided analytics approach to BI. Self-service BI paves the way for workers to be autonomous, thereby improving productivity and increasing the efficiency of business processes. With this business impact, this trend will continue to grow in 2014 and beyond.”

6. Data visualization improves

As self-service BI grows, software must become simpler. It must display data in a way that’s easily understandable for anyone–not just data scientists. For this reason, we’ll see BI solutions provide improved data visualizations for all user levels.

“I just published my research on business intelligence software buyer trends for 2014 and one big takeaway was that buyers overwhelmingly want better data visualization,” says Abe Selig, Business Intelligence Researcher at Software Advice. “What this tells me is that business intelligence is moving away from the exclusive realm of data analysts and falling into the hands of business professionals who want the insights that accompany BI. Over 60% of prospective BI software buyers are business professionals (rather than IT professionals). These professionals are looking for the decision-making support that comes with BI, but don’t want to get bogged down in the weeds studying the data that BI has traditionally entailed. They want to see what the data means, and they want to see it quickly, and easily.”

“In fact, my report shows that the most requested business intelligence applications from buyers right now are customizable dashboards and scorecards. While current BI users are generally satisfied with their reporting capabilities, they want to better visualize the data they are collecting. Buyers want a BI tool that can pull data from their existing systems into an attractive, informative, easy-to-understand dashboard. This also points to the awakening of non BI professionals to the decision-making support of business intelligence and the growing desire to harness its insights for unique, company-specific information in a clear way.”

7. Cloud-based BI grows

While cloud-based BI certainly isn’t new, we’ll see significant growth this year. As data volume grows, managing that data in-house becomes more challenging. The pain of maintaining infrastructure combined with the growing maturity of the cloud will result in more businesses moving their BI to cloud services.

“The initial apprehensions around the reliability, safety and sustainability of cloud computing are slowly fading away, and companies are increasing their overall spend on cloud infrastructure,” explains Nandavarapu. “The intersection of analytics and cloud is creating new value and means to exploit Big Data. Cloud versions of BI software will rise in 2014 due to various benefits it provides such as ease of use, flexibility, reduced costs, lower implementation time and faster ROI.”

So, what do you think? Is there anything you would add to this list? If so, please share your thoughts in the comments.